Driving Product Adoption With Data-Driven Insights

Building on the value of data

Those in the fast-paced restaurant or concessions business face a number of challenges, ranging from determining how much bread to buy to how to implement a loyalty program for customers. Bypass is a POS & Management System for multi-site food and beverage operations that brings the innovation and sophistication of e-commerce to the physical world.

Founded in 2010 as a mobile app, Bypass initially focused on giving customers a way to order food and beverages from their seat in sports stadiums—to “bypass” the line. By 2012, the company recognized that there was a need for a more cohesive POS system to support the kinds of initiatives that its customers wanted, like mobile ordering. “We realized that our customers clearly needed a more robust system, so we set our sights on becoming a fullfledged POS system provider, developing front-of-house and back office solutions,” says Travis Favaron, SeniorProduct Manager at Bypass. Once the POS system launched, the company soon expanded beyond stadiums to the fast-casual market.

“We strive to help our food and beverage customers use data and technology so they can increase revenue and profits in a user-friendly platform,” says Favaron. “Naturally, this requires us to collect large amounts of data so our customers can make informed business decisions.”

Running on the reporting treadmill

"By 2014, it was becoming clear that we needed to make data more actionable and actually help inform decisionmaking, instead of the simple reporting we’d provided previously,” explains Favaron. Struggling to find the information they were looking for, customers were starting to ask Bypass for custom features and personalization, which the company needed to create from scratch each time a request came through. “As we started to get into larger, more complex markets, we realized that creating custom solutions for each client was not going to cut it any more.”

Expanding into new markets also introduced Bypass to customers with vastly different needs and complexity levels in terms of ordering and inventory management— even within the same vertical. “An MLS stadium that seats roughly 20,000 people has a very different level of complexity than an MLB stadium with 40,000 fans and 81 home games a season,” explains Favaron.

And while the new solution needed to be able to handle numerous customization requests and meet a wide range of customer needs, it also needed to process data and identify trends much faster than the previous solution. “When you have thousands of fans in a building for a seven-game series, being able to quickly determine if something has gone awry and then immediately correct it can save our clients millions of dollars, ” explains Favaron. “Our old offering just wasn’t robust enough to keep up with the sheer volume of data we were collecting nor the customization requested.”

Building the team

Bypass needed an end-to-end platform that could provide flexibility, handle increasing data volumes, and immediately deliver those insights to everyday workers in a way that the action to be taken was obvious. Creating a solution this advanced would have taken Bypass thousands of hours in engineering and require expertise and knowledge that they didn’t have in house. Recognizing that an outside provider would allow them to go to market faster while not taking their eye off their own product roadmap, Bypass began to search for a partner that could meet all these needs in a solution that could be seamlessly integrated in its application at the point of work. “If we couldn’t build this new, more robust offering ourselves, then it was really important to us that our customers still recognize us as Bypass, not a third party. Integrating into our existing application was vital,” explains Favaron.

Bypass began evaluating potential partners in the spring of 2015 and selected GoodData by April. “The GoodData platform checked every box on our list, but what we really appreciated was how flexible the platform was. GoodData was able to configure it to meet our needs and those of our customers easily and quickly,” says Favaron. The two companies started building the ETL and reporting structure for the first iteration, which launched in June 2015.

“It’s hard to quantify just how much time GoodData saved us, because we were constantly putting out small fires and rarely had enough time to devote to a new project,” says Favaron. “It would’ve taken us at least 18 months to develop a minimum viable product on our own, and it would’ve pulled a lot of time, energy, and money away from our own product. With GoodData, we had the first MVP in a matter of weeks.”

Reports on Tap

Right away, the GoodData platform solved Bypass’s primary problem: spending too much time creating custom reports for client requests. During the evaluation of the first iteration, Bypass’s customers submitted more than 100 feature requests, which GoodData then built into the platform. “Internally, the biggest selling point for us was that GoodData could enable us to take a standing item off our to-do list so we could free that time up to focus on engineering and our own product,” says Favaron. “Before, we were essentially on a reporting treadmill, spending a lot of hours building these customizations with no end in sight.”

By embedding GoodData into Bypass, they immediately increased the number of business critical questions that could be answer exponentially. They made it easy for customers to explore their data by dozens of metrics and thousands of metric combinations. “It changed the sales conversation away from how many reports we offer and back to the value Bypass provides,” explains Favaron. The data is also now presented in context at the point of work, which makes it easier to understand the various business impacts of a decision. “Being able to pinpoint a problem and make an informed decision in that moment can save our clients significant amounts of money,” explains Favaron. “For large stadiums or multi-game series, this can make a dramatic difference to their bottom line.”

Bypass enhanced the user experience in the way the data is displayed. It’s quite unique, enabling users to progressively filter down by each attribute one at a time. “As our customers examine the data, they have the ability to personalize their view allowing them to uncover trends they may not have been looking for,” says Favaron.

“Our old reports required a user to preselect their parameters and showed the data that met all of those criteria. With GoodData, our customers are able to drill down level-by-level—from sales to alcoholic beverage sales to sales by level or even cashier. With this level of detail, our customers can quickly address problems they may not have known they had and adjust accordingly.”

After partnering with GoodData, Bypass has found success in three key areas:

Revenue

For customers looking for more in-depth insights, Bypass began to offer premium reporting, creating an additional revenue stream.The speed of insight delivery and embedded nature of the platform also gave Bypass the ability to expand into complex markets it had previously struggled to enter due to the insufficient capabilities of its prior solution. “We worked hard to develop our own solutions, and now we’re able to show our current and potential clients the full value of what we offer,” says Favaron. “Since partnering with GoodData, we’ve seen faster sales cycles as potential customers recognize that our insights are readily apparent and immediately actionable.”

Improved Relationships

The introduction of the GoodData platform gave Bypass customers what they wanted: more robust and customized insights in an easily exported format. “The ability to export data into a separate document for presentations and record-keeping was of critical importance to our customers,” explains Favaron. “By adding that feature into the platform, GoodData helped us prove to our customers that their concerns are a priority for us and helped us retain existing customers through the transition.” By removing the ongoing need to create custom reports, Bypass can focus on continually updating its own solution for its customers.

Innovation

“Our customers are realizing how data can help them achieve better outcomes, from identifying upsell opportunities for items frequently purchased together to sales trends for potential price increases,” explains Favaron. “The GoodData platform has collected all this data and provides insights that allow the customer to take action right where and when they need it, so our customers can determine which levers to pull immediately to improve their bottom line.” The ongoing partnership between GoodData and Bypass also ensures that new ideas or requests can be built into the platform as they arise. “We’re always striving to innovate and so are our customers,” says Favaron. “Working with a partner focused on improving its own product and incorporating new features as we grow is a huge advantage.”

Additional resources

If you’d like to discover more about embedded analytics and the GoodData platform, we have a number of additional resources available.

Visit GoodData’s embedded analytics website to learn more about different types of embedded analytics, solutions, benefits, and additional customer success stories.

With the embedded analytics trial, you can see GoodData’s analytics platform embedded in an application’s user interface so you can get a clear example of what embedded ad hoc data discovery looks like. Explore a demo application enhanced by analytics visualizations, then create analytical insights using an intuitive drag-and-drop experience.